


breathe, keep breathing, I can't do this alone

by fuckitfireeverything



Category: Marvel (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 06:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckitfireeverything/pseuds/fuckitfireeverything
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe, Clint realized with a stomach-dropping intake of breath, this — sitting, waiting — is what it meant to love Phil Coulson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	breathe, keep breathing, I can't do this alone

When he saw the image of Coulson's face, pale and exsanguinated, on the comm screen, grating, maniacal laughter like a laugh track in the background of the video feed, he felt like his heart was stopping. This was the second time he’d felt this weird, constricting, heart-stopping pain in his chest since joining SHIELD — and the first had turned out to be cardiac arrest.

"He's bleeding out," he heard Natasha whisper from behind him, something almost approaching concern in her voice.

Clint turned away, grip tightening on his bow. "Fury," he spat through gritted teeth. "Send me in. Now."

Fury focused one dark eye firmly on him and ordered, "Romanoff. Ouellet. Cromer. You leave in three minutes."

Two agents Clint had never seen before stepped up next to Natasha before the three headed out and Fury stalked into his office, slamming the door behind him. Not that doors had ever been an obstacle for Clint. He stalked right in after Fury, slamming his hands on the desk with a frightening intensity.

"Fury," he repeated, arms shaking with the force of his grip. "Send me in."

"Can't," Fury told him, calmly. "SHIELD regulations don't allow for family members to get involved in search and rescue missions."

"Family?"

"Just because you don't wear the ring at work doesn't mean you're hiding it convincingly."

"We're not _married._ Send me in," he snarled.

"Right." Fury reached for something, and for a split second Clint allowed himself to hope that maybe Fury was listening for once, that it would only be a matter of minutes before he was on his way off the helicarrier, speeding towards wherever they were holding Phil. And at the same time, he was so distracted by the fact that he was still not sure his heart ever started back up that he didn’t notice the agent who restrained his arms from behind as he opened his mouth to argue.

"We're keeping you here, Barton," Fury instructed. "And try not to injure Agent Kaplan. We may need to send her in as backup later."

Clint sat in interrogation room number seven for eight hours, staring at the ceiling of the only room secure enough to hold him. He slid his hand in and out of the handcuffs indecisively, dislocating his thumb to fit his broad hands through the small circle of metal, and he wondered if maybe this was what Phil would want him to do. Stay still. Follow orders. Maybe it said something to Phil that Clint was still in the helicarrier and not out there searching, compromising his own safety. Maybe, Clint realized with a stomach-dropping intake of breath, this — sitting, waiting — is what it meant to love Phil Coulson.

***

Every morning Clint grits his teeth before opening his eyes, passes the mirror without a glance, grimaces as he swallows a mouthful of cold coffee. And then he's on the shooting range for six hours, until his meeting at 11, bow string blistering his forearm, muscles tensing from overexertion. Every morning for ten months, three hundred some mornings, every morning since Natasha had placed her awkwardly stiff hand on his shoulder and told him, "I'm sorry. We were too late."

Fury had taken him off active duty months ago, so he spends noon to midnight on the shooting range as well, because shooting is a compulsion, because when he's shooting he's still breathing. When he's shooting he can almost pretend to hear Phil's voice over the comm link. Shooting isn't paperwork and it isn't sleeping in an empty bed, and so he shoots.

He doesn't spend much time thinking anymore. Thinking hadn't done anything, sitting alone in an interrogation room when he should have been searching. Thinking, now, turned into blaming — Natasha, Fury, SHIELD, but more often himself, for letting Phil get captured in the first place, for not insisting on going with him, for not insisting he stay behind. But sometimes not thinking is almost as dangerous as thinking, because if he's not thinking he might forget that when he opens the apartment door at night coming home from the shooting range, Phil won't be there reading the news in the cool light of his laptop, waiting up. 

Today, like every day, he is sitting down a few minutes before midnight to peel the tape off his bleeding forearm, the skin scraped clean off by the continuous swipe of the bow string, when his phone rings.

“Agent Barton,” Fury’s rough voice comments through the speaker.

“Congratulations,” he responds. “You can dial a phone.”

He’s sure Fury doesn’t even bat his good eye at the comment, as he continues to speak as if Clint hasn’t interrupted him. “Many of your co-workers have been expressing... concern in relation to your behaviour for the past few months. They’re worried you aren’t sleeping, aren’t eating, aren’t functioning in a healthy manner. Aren’t, well, coping with your grief. In light of this information, we’ve decided to give you some time off.”

“Thanks, sir,” Clint answers, and comes in to work the next day anyway. 

Fury calls him again, and this time “time off” has become “suspension,” and when he tries it again he finds himself locked out of headquarters. His ID badge won’t give him access to the building, to his office, to the shooting range. But the ID badge was always just a formality, and there’s a perfectly good ventilation system that leads right to the range, and it’s even big enough he can fit his bow through with his body.

So this time Fury sends an agent after him to escort him off the base.

Phil isn’t sitting in the apartment waiting when he gets home in the afternoon either, apparently. Phil will never be sitting in the apartment waiting, no matter what time he gets home, but if he had to pick a second love of his life to be waiting for him, he’s pretty glad Jack Daniels is the one he’s got.

The next morning, aching and numb, Clint answers his phone, “I know, Fury. I’m not coming in today. Don’t worry. I got your message.”

He rubs the swollen bruise across his cheek as he speaks, wincing at the memory of the previous day’s “escort.” Clint would just love to see Fury deal with the shit he puts them all through daily, just once.

But there is silence on the other end of the line. Soft static, and silence. Then,

“Clint.”

The voice on the other end is distant, so quiet Clint can barely hear it, but he recognizes it, had once grown used to it, has heard this voice every day for a thousand days, and Clint knows this voice even as it breaks, would know it anywhere.

“Phil, oh God, Phil.”

The air in his lungs shatters as he speaks. He chokes for oxygen, the wind knocked out of him as if he’s been knocked flat on his back. He can’t breathe in enough to continue to speak.

“Clint.” Phil’s voice is calm, though strained. He speaks evenly. “I need you to come get me.”

Still struggling for breath, Clint hastily writes the address as Phil speaks it and as fast as he can throw on a pair of jeans and slide a gun into his waistband, he’s sprinting down the street as fast as his tired muscles will carry him.

He finds Phil slumped against a dumpster, hidden from the street, nearly invisible to untrained eyes. Phil’s face, worn, bleeding, unnaturally pale, breaks apart into a smile which Clint worries will split this chewed-up lips and open the few cuts struggling to heal on his face.

Phil’s breathing is laboured; he grimaces each time he inhales, clutching his rib cage with one hand. His skin is more purple than white, spotted with bruises wherever there are not cuts.

“Let’s get you home,” Clint says, voice wavering as he goes to pick Phil up. Phil winces, flinching away from the contact and gasps, “just call SHIELD.”

“It’s okay, I’ve got you.”

Firmer this time, Phil tells him, “Please. Just call SHIELD.”

That’s when Clint notices the blood seeping through the front of Phil’s shirt, spreading to cover most of his torso. He rips the fabric away and nearly gags at the sight of the wound stretched across Phil’s torso. Even he, a seasoned SHIELD agent who has tucked his own broken bone back into a boot to stabilize it for long enough to complete a mission, has to look away.

“I’m fine,” Phil says. “Breathe. Just don’t look at it. Breathe.”

Clint dials Fury from his phone, and when he’s done he asks Phil, “what can I do?”

“Just wait with me. Just stay.”

***

A doctor whose name Clint doesn’t know tells him that most of the cuts won’t even scar. The ribs will be fine in a few months. The skin on his torso will never be the same, but a little scar tissue never hurt anyone.

Phil’s confined to the medical bay for a few days while they patch him up and debrief him, which means so is Clint, sitting by his bedside constantly until various doctors shoo him away to make room.

“What happened?” Clint asks one day as he watches Phil reading in his bed in the med bay. 

A strange look crosses Phil’s face and he lowers the book from his face. 

“Tasha said... I thought... You were dead, Phil.”

“Obviously not.”

He leaves it there. It’s apparent Phil would rather not talk about what happened, and besides Clint sees Fury coming around the corner for yet another debrief meeting, and Clint has had enough of that man to last several lifetimes.

“I’m sorry,” Phil says, barely audible, as Clint turns to leave.

***

They move out of SHIELD housing a month later, into a fifth floor walkup on 84th and Lex with a slanted floor and the biggest bed they can find. Clint buys two matching rings, simple and silver and thin enough that the new added weight on his left hand won’t affect his aim at all. Phil, face clean and scar-free, can’t seem to stop smiling.

Clint isn’t used to the presence of another person in his bed anymore, and he finds himself waking up every time Phil shifts in his sleep, the changing weight on the cheap mattress just enough to set his senses on edge. One night Phil wakes up to Clint staring at him, and asks, with concern, “Why are you awake?”

“Didn’t want to miss a minute of looking at you,” Clint mumbles into his ear, hoping he’ll buy the lie. 

Phil seems satisfied enough, kisses Clint until his eyes refuse to stay open any longer. But the truth is that Clint has been ten times as alert since he got Phil back, constantly worried that if he looks away for too long, Phil will be gone. That if he goes to sleep, he’ll wake up and getting Phil back will have all been a dream. 

Clint grows accustomed to tracing the contours of Phil’s face with his eyes, his fingertips, his tongue again, grows accustomed to hot coffee in the morning and a warm bed at night, hands on his skin and a smile on his face. He spends his days back in the field, his evenings reacquainting himself with his lover, and his nights sleepless, watching the way the streetlights outside the window change Phil’s face as he shifts in his sleep. 

“Aren’t you tired?” Phil mumbles, eyes still closed, running his hand up Clint’s bare chest a few weeks later. 

“Have to make sure you’re safe,” Clint admits, because apparently lack of sleep and honesty go hand-in-hand with him, and anyway he knows Phil knows when he lies.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Can’t take that chance.”

“You aren’t, remember?” Phil smiles, running his fingers over the smooth surface of Clint’s ring, intertwining their fingers. 

“I love you.”

Phil takes a deep breath and sits up, holding Clint’s hands tightly in his own. “I thought,” he begins, biting the inside of his cheek and looking down, “that if they thought I was dead, they’d dump my body somewhere and I could find my way to you.”

Clint pushes himself up onto his elbow, takes Phil’s chin gently in one hand, and looks him in the eye.

“SHIELD-issue tetrodotoxin shot. Had it up my sleeve. Slows the heart, lowers the body temperature. Like in Romeo and Juliet. Plan didn’t go as I expected. They’d transported me before Natasha and the others even got close. Big shock for them when I woke up again. Guard got so scared he broke my ribs — that was the first time they were broken.”

He inhales slowly before continuing.

“They interrogated me a little, but mostly kept me locked up in isolation. I think they were planning on using me as ransom or something, but I managed to swipe a gun off one of the guards eventually and broke my way out.”

Phil looks exhausted, and so Clint doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t tell Phil that he knows there must be something he’s leaving out. He doesn’t tell Phil that he needs to put on this professional brave face to tell Clint his story. He doesn’t tell Phil how he occupied those same ten months. Instead, he kisses Phil’s eyes closed, kisses Phil’s lips and neck and chest and every inch, kisses Phil until his lips are numb.

***

Phil’s back to active duty pretty soon. He heals quickly and if Phil Coulson were capable of begging, Clint would have described the event as Phil begging Fury to let him come back to work. But Phil Coulson doesn’t beg.

Phil’s reading the newspaper one morning, Clint waxing his bow across the table, when Phil’s phone rings.

“Coulson,” he answers it, and Clint watches him as he listens for a minute, responds, “I’m on it. Leaving in ten,” and hangs up.

“Got an assignment,” he tells Clint, folding the newspaper and standing up.

“I’m coming with you this time,” Clint insists, already halfway to the door to pack his things. “Where are we headed?”

Phil looks up at him and grins.

“New Mexico.”

**Author's Note:**

> title is from Radiohead's Exit Music (For a Film)
> 
> for Arielle


End file.
